Archives for June, 2006

Younger offspring: I drew this picture of the Earth! Dr. Free-Ride: Wow, that’s quite a picture. Will you tell me what’s going on in it? Younger offspring: Yes, but first scan it in. Dr. Free-Ride: Hmm. Is it maybe not a coincidence that you’re bringing home a picture like this on a Thursday night?

Coming up on a long holiday weekend, you all are ready for another internet quiz, right? I can’t help wondering whether the “Birth Order Predictor” quiz is not well-grounded in the sociological facts, or whether there really isn’t any such coherent set of sociological facts, or whether I’m just a weirdo. Because it’s hard to…

A long time ago, I blogged about Dr. Eric T. Poehlman, formerly of the University of Vermont College of Medicine. He’s no longer there because he was caught falsifying and fabricating data in the “preliminary studies” sections of numerous grant proposals submitted to federal agencies and departments. Today comes the news that Dr. Poehlman will…

Interesting news from Japan: Tohoku University has decided to launch an outreach effort to encourage more girls to pursue science. Rather than relying on secondary school science classes to whip up enthusiam for science, the university is recruiting its own women graduate students in the sciences to serve as role models and mentors. From the…

It’s been two weeks since we kicked off our first ever ScienceBlogs/DonorsChoose drive to raise money for math and science classrooms. In that time, 172 generous readers have donated a total of $13,685.14 and SEED has kicked in $10,000. But there are three days left of the drive, and I know you all have some…

I’m not going to do this to death, partly because others will and partly because Churchill isn’t a scientist. But, given that I’m working the ethics beat at ScienceBlogs, I ought to give you the ethical crib-sheet: Plagiarism is bad. Self-plagiarism (that is, recycling stuff you’ve written and published before without indicating that you’re recycling…

I just got back from a 75 minute ethics seminar for summer researchers (mostly undergraduates) at a large local center of scientific research. While it was pretty hard to distill the important points on ethical research to just over an hour, I can’t tell you how happy I am that they’re even including ethics training…

Following up from yesterday’s post about how knowledge about the biological basis for X doesn’t tell us whether X is to be valued or pathologized, I need to put a few more points (including some questions) on the table. First, in the comments thread to the Feministing post that prompted my post, a common (and…

Chad thinks it’s a good point in the week for internet quizzes. So, since I saw it at Arbitrary Marks, I took a quiz to determine my ethical style. (No, “bossy” isn’t one of the possible results.) What the quiz says about me after the jump.

Jessica at Feministing notices the BBC reporting on a study that conditions in utero may play a causal role in men’s sexual orientation. But, as the title of this post suggests, I do not care what the biological bases for sexual orientation might be, nor indeed whether there are biological bases for sexual orientation. Jessica…